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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

One This Day In History: The President Finally Gets a Phone

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Herbert Hoover brings Mr. Bell's invention into the Oval Office

﻿﻿﻿ On this day in 1929, President Herbert Hoover received the first telephone call in the Oval Office from his son. There had been phones and a switchboard at the White House since 1878 when Rutherford B. Hayes had the first ones installed. But there had never been a phone in the Oval Office until Herbert Hoover got tired of having to use the phone in the foyer, and ordered a line run to his desk. They ran into some technical difficulties, and it took a while to get Hoover's phone working correctly, but the President of the United States finally got his own digits on March 29th, 1929.

is an author and novelist whose work includes the award-winning non-fiction historical series Famous American Freemasons and the novels One Last Shot (2011), A Shot After Midnight (2012) and Shot to Hell (2014).